First, it was one day short of a month after the San Francisco earthquake and fire, and a benefit for the victims. Second, it took place in the recently completed Greek Theatre, which excited Bernhardt in its evocation of Epidaurus and confirmed Berkeley’s status as the “Athens of the West” (a glow only slightly dimmed by one cynic’s description of the University as Sparta next to Harvard’s Athens, even with Cambridge’s decidedly un-Athenian weather and topography). Third, and perhaps most important, it marked the beginning of a century of performing-arts presentations at Berkeley, now culminating in the 100th anniversary celebration of Cal Performances. The gala on May 12 capping those festivities at Zellerbach Hall includes Mark Morris (who has made Berkeley his West Coast home and Chez Panisse his eatery of choice), John Adams (who lives in Berkeley), and Michael Tilson Thomas (who conducts the San Francisco Symphony), among many others.

The designation of the Bernhardt Phèdre may be a little arbitrary: Other notable performances had taken place on the Berkeley campus before then. And the name “Cal Performances” only came into being about 25 years ago, shortly before Robert Cole took over the directorship of the series. But that there have been 100 years of professional performing arts on the Berkeley campus, in varying halls under varying series titles and with varying directors (most notably, at least until now, Betty Connors, from 1945 to 1979), there can be no doubt. And that’s worth celebrating.

It’s worth celebrating because there has been a lot of great work offered to the East Bay (before the bridges) and Bay Area publics, not to speak of the campus and its members. And because the rise of the amplitude and sophistication of Berkeley arts presentations speaks to a larger national trend, whereby university campuses and their arts centers have played a growing role in the dissemination and propagation of the performing arts.

To generalize perhaps too brutally, performing arts outside New York City and the major regional capitals (San Francisco was such a capital before Los Angeles and even Seattle arose to challenge its West Coast supremacy) used to be the prerogative of major New York impresarios such as P. T. Barnum or Sol Hurok. Think Jenny Lind or the Ballets Russes or Arthur Rubinstein. New York proposed, the country gratefully disposed.

A lot of great art still emerges from New York, but nobody has a monopoly anymore. Cole is as likely to work with (or be in competition with) the Brooklyn Academy of Music as with the big booking agencies. The circuit is no longer whistle-stops from Peoria to Paducah, but in gleaming new arts centers at major state and private universities all across the country. (Zellerbach is not exactly gleaming, but we’ll get to that later.) Those include, of course, the other campuses in the UC system.

And Cal Performances is seriously involved with generating arts programs of its own, nowhere more notably than the biennial Berkeley Festival & Exhibition of early music, which starts June 4. Cal Performances also often crops up as a co-producer in the credits of events that tour the international festival circuit.

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